Some of the core ideas that Turing considered were: What does it mean to compute something? Can computation ever be used to mimic or reproduce intelligence, and would be able to tell the difference?

You can find out about all the events on at http://www.turingcentenary.eu/

If you want to go one step further and learn more about what CS is about and how Turing’s ideas changed the world you may still be able to sign up for one of the courses being offered free and online by Stanford University.  The Computer Science 101 course is a good way to start understanding how the computers that make our modern world possible function, a world Alan Turing contributed so pivotally to making possible. For a bit more of a challenge the course on cryptography should address the same issues Turing and his team at Bletchley Park worried about trying break Nazi codes. Turing’s other popularly known contribution was about the relation between computation and intelligence. This would have been best addressed by the course on AI offerred last term which thousands of people registered for. That course is not offered this term, but some related courses this term are offered on machine learning and graphical models which are at the forefront of modern research into artificial intelligence.

Happy  ScienceSunday

Today I came across an odd analysis of several legitimate problems by Barry Devlin.
(via Marshall Kirkpatrick’s google+ feed)

I’m sure the analysis is well intentioned and perhaps I have misread some of his claims but he appears to be blaming three major, societal problems on one thing they all seem to have in common … the use of algorithms.

The three problems he lists are:

• Insurance Companies overanalysing patient data to deny them coverage
• Automated Stock Trading software playing time delays to beat any poor human traders
• Movie Studios analysing data to determine what movies people like to get the biggest bang for their buck

These are legitimate and worrying problems, but placing blame on overuse of algorithms per se is kinda strange.

Algorithms are simply systems which solve problems. They can be as simple as a recipe for baking a cake or as subtle and complex as Google’s search algorithm. Trying to encourage people to use less algorithms in the modern world is like encouraging people “to use less hammers” and beat the nails in with their hands. “We’re just throwing up buildings at an unnatural rate because of all these fancy hammers.” The problems he points out stem from other choices that are implicitly being made, the intensive use of algorithms does not cause them.

The problem of insurance companies over analysing their clients and denying coverage is inevitable when you have an unregulated, profit driven insurance industry. Regulate the industry so that they can’t use certain information, or so they cannot deny coverage in certain circumstances. Or if this is the US you are worried about, switch to a single payer health care system and take most of that power away from insurance companies altogether. Obviously they are going to do everything they can to make money. Either take away their incentive or restrict what they can do, complaining that they should not try so hard by analysing any data they are allowed to use doesn’t make sense.

High speed, automated trading is a very important issue which needs to be addressed. But again, this isn’t about not allowing people to do as much analysis as they want, it is about levelling the playing field. Why should large trading companies get an advantage because they can afford larger servers or can rent the rooms beside the NY Stock exchange computers to reduce their lag time? Implement a regulation saying that there must be a fixed minimum delay between all trades. Or alter the trading software in the markets to only accept trades every x microseconds. Again, saying algorithms are the problem is saying that are playing the game too well when you are only giving them incentives to play that game.

As for movies and how collaborative filtering will help studios understand exactly what kinds of movies people are willing to pay the most for, he answers the question himself. Any studio that only tries to make movies that are like last year’s hits is going to lose out to a more creative studio that actually makes popular movies no one was expecting. That’s not the algorithm’s fault, that’s just bad marketing strategy.

So I just don’t see where he’s coming from. Algorithms completely permeate our lives, they always have.
Computers just make it more obvious.

This is just a few quick few notes about the events at AAAI this year and my own biased view of what was hot. But keep in mind there is  such a broad set of papers, presentations, posters and demos from a huge number of brilliant people that its impossible for one person to give you a full view of what went on.  I encourage you to look over the program here, and read the papers that interest you.

From the conference talks I attended and the people I talked to people were most excited about:

• Learning Relationships from Social Networks – lots of fascinating work here including one of the invited talks.  Kind of ironic though that so few AAAI11 attendees seem to use social media like twitter during the conference. You can take a look at #aaa11 (and even #aaai and #aaai2011) for the limited chatter there was.
• Planning with UCT and bandit problems
• Microtext (I don’t know what that is but it’s apparently fascinating)
• Computational Social Choice – a Borda manipulation proof won outstanding paper in this track.
• Multiagent Systems applied to everything
• Computational Sustainability
• Natural Language Processing – especially from blogs and social media
• and everyone I talked to seems to agree that Watson was pretty awesome

You care about AI more than our jobs!

There was a huge diversity of problem domains and AI methods brought to bear on them. This was an interesting way to attend AAAI actually since each session had a variety of approaches, exposing a lot of the variety of approaches there is at a large general conference like AAAI. Most of my most vigourous discussions were with people in very different fields from me since we both needed to translate each other’s language and discover our own assumptions. I think this is something that happens less often at more focussed conferences.

One of papers chosen as outstanding paper (one of only two as far as I could tell) came from the CompSust track (Dynamic Resource Allocation in Conservation Planning by Daniel Golovin, Andreas Krause, Beth Gardner, Sarah J. Converse, Steve Morey). This was a very impressive project on reserve management for nature reserves to protect wildlife which was the result of wide collaboration between universities, government and industry.

Just some of the domains and methods used in the papers in this track to give you an idea of the variety the topics:

Domains
- smart energy grid design
- distributed energy storage
- nature reserve planning
- wildlife migration corridors
- building energy efficiency, comparing and improving efficiency
- water conservation in residental landscapes
- bird species tracking

Methods
- market simulation of energy tariffs with Qlearning
- multiagent planning – an agent buying and selling power from the grid from your local batteries
in order to lower your energy bill and maintain the necessary power needed no demand
- steiner multigraph optimization
- modelling interactions between plants as agents and optimize their placement and watering
- graphical probabilisitc models
- boosted regression trees

From Structured Prediction to Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Hal Daume III

This was quite an interesting and well run tutorial.  He was trying to highlight the  relation between structured prediction and Inverse Reinforcement Learning, also called apprenticeship learning.  There was a lot of content but there was a common theme of learning linear classifiers using various methods (prerceptrons, SVMs) for part of language understanding and other problems. He then related this to Inverse Reinforcement Learning which is essentially trying to learn the reward function from an optimal policy rather than the other way around. This can be done by observing an ‘optimal’ agent (assuming you have one) and using the same techniques as in structured prediction to iteratively improve your estimate of the agent’s reward model. Once you have this reward model you can now do normal reinforcement learning to find an optimal policy that is more robust than simply doing supervised learning since you are not mimicking their actions but mimicking their intent.

Philosophy as AI and AI as Philosophy
Aaron Sloman

I had been torn this afternoon between two tutorials to attend, the overview of the latest results in classical planning which I really should attend and this very broad philosophy and AI tutorial. Nature intervened and made the choice for me though as the planning tutorial was cancelled. Prof. Sloman gave us a general overview of many branches of philosophy and how he believes they relate deeply to Artificial Intelligence.

The main point of his talk and much of his work over the past thirty years is increase the flow of ideas in both directions between philosophy and computer science, but specifically AI. He argues that there is lots each field could contribute to the other. So, philosophical ideas and open problems could guide AI research into areas that could help resolve philosophical questions. One fun question is what is humour? What does it mean for something to be funny? From an AI perspective, what would need to be true for us to say that a computer found a joke funny? This is as opposed to a computer identifying a statement as funny. Is there a difference?

Near the end when he was summing up he also stated that he believes philosophers who do learn about AI concepts are deeply changed by it and can then address philosophical questions in ways they previously could not. He calls on young AI researchers to join him in trying to bridge these gaps and start more discussion on the philosophical questions AI could address rather than just the engineering questions.

He makes some bold claims but it was a very informative tutorial and he seems to have a lot of very reasonable and interesting things to say.  His basic claim is that a lot of the time people try to fit complex, fully general models to classification and prediction problems when their data is actually linear and simpler methods would be much more effective. A time series is any data set which has data points occurring in a fixed linear ordering. In response to someone’s question he did make clear that you need to make some reasonable assumptions about how much variation there is over time. So data where events can occur in arbitrary order won’t work. Also, if it’s equally likely that some event may occur every 0.1 seconds or occur every 10 hours then it probably won’t work either. But a lot of real data sets actually vary within a small time range. What time series methods can handle, apparently, is almost arbitrary variation in the magnitude of the number, in anomalies in the middle of a set of data, in outliers that don’t fit the average cases and several other types of variation.

This makes time series very powerful for sensor data and medical data of well understood processes.  Keogh’s focus is on symbolic analysis of data which has obvious applications for genetic datasets but is apparently also very effective for continuous, real valued data. The basic idea is to cluster the time series into levels and label these levels. Patterns of these labels can then be used to discover motifs in the data which often have an understandable semantic meaning.

There are several questions that arise with this approach, some of which he answered as well.  Basically, he argues that most data can be analysed using simple Euclidean distance and linear transformations on the time series with anomaly detection. The worry with this is that you may just find a pattern when there isn’t really one present if you stretch and shift the data enough.  It is important to treat a pattern detected in this way as merely a theory which is then verified by going back to the original data or to some independent data source.  He confirmed that this is what they always do but that when such anomalies arise in real datasets they very often are meaningful or can guide further exploration.

I’m very excited for this year’s AAAI because:

a) I’m presenting a paper on my thesis research on thursday (10:20am session – how can you resist a catchy title like “Policy Gradient Planning for Environmental Decision Making with Existing Simulators”? Also, the paper before me is listed as an “Outstanding Paper”, so at least you’ll see that.)

b) This is a very exciting time for AI research. There are lots of reasons for this but for me two exciting new fields where AI is being applied in new ways which are featured prominently in this year’s AAAI conference: Social Media and Sustainability.

I don’t know much about AI applied to social media so that will be fascinating to find out about.

There is a special track this year on Computational Sustainability which is a new field which focusses on applying machine learning, probabilistic modeling and optimization techniques to very challenging environmental problems.  This is the track my paper is in. It will be really interesting to meet with lots of people trying to use AI to better the world.

Watch this space.

I think you should think of social networks as if they were cities.
There are a lot of these cities and towns right now all with very different cultures and populations:

• LinkedInPark
• Gplussopolis
• FacebookCity
• Tumblrtown
• Stumblessauga
• QuoraCommune
• MySpaceVille
• Yahooburgh

Many people ‘live’ in multiple cities and this is as it should be since they all offer quite different experiences. The thing with G+ is that it is more general than most of these services and in particular it seems that the goal is that very soon more  features will be added so that G+ will completely subsume the features of Facebook and Twitter. So, you know, it is war in fact.

But keep in mind it is war between the companies running these services, the populations don’t need to get involved.

We probably all have a home city, a social network we live in more than others. For most people that’s Facebook. It’s like the suburban heartland megacity of social networks. Its pretty much where everyone is, its good, could be better, it’s full of drive-thrus fast food, highways and casinos; but it’s hard to change things now because its so damn big.

For other people their home is Twitter.
Twitter is so cool you don’t even need to talk, you just exchange compact, knowing glances and handshakes. Its Seattle, Montreal or the Village; it doesn’t need you and your paragraph length diatribes.
But now we have G+. It’s cool, technically savvy, fast and connects everything. It’s San Francisco and all the nerds are moving over and proclaiming in their old haunts how much better everything would be if all your pleebs just switched over too.

Just because you move to a new city and like it better doesn’t mean you abandon the old one entirely.  You still know alot of people in the old place, people you care about, one would assume. Hassling those people to come live in your fancy new city, even saying you’re just not going to call or visit the old place because it so out of date, well, that’s kind of rude.  You wouldn’t threaten to cut all contact with people just because they refuse to move to another city in the real world, so why do it in the virtual world? (I know its not exactly the same, since you probably will still email or meet these people in real life, but there is a personal tone developing to the community you use which seems unnecessary)

Some people just don’t like moving and may never move. When it comes down to it, these social network cities are about the people in them, not the technology we are using. So I’m still in FacebookCity and I’m going to stay,  or at least keep visiting, as long as I have lots of friends there, which will be for a long time I expet.

But lets just say I’m not buying a new house there anytime soon and I’m spending a lot of time visiting the shiny new metropolis. So if you want to stop by, I’ll show you around.

It sounds like there will be a lot of changes and new features being released that will address some of the problems people have found. This is fantastic. All I suggest is that the core changes are released before the floodgates are opened. This isn’t just a selfish desire to see the features first, it would be better for the success of G+. Right now most people on G+ (plussers? blech, need a better term for that.) are fairly nerdy and meta. If the discussion format changes they will investigate it, explore, learn how it works and optimize their approach to the new system. Just like they would when playing a board game, which they all do I expect.

But most people aren’t that meticulous or patient. So if you let in lots of people and then change a bunch of features on them before they even get comfortable, you’ll loose people right away.

So, (1) fix the main shortfalls

• add search to the stream
• allow merging or circles in some way, at least a “not-in circle” circle
• an API to let people develop apps and connect services to this stream
• for God’s sake, add the ability to temporarily disable the red box notification in the corner so you don’t destabilize this delicate economic recovery with a millions of lost work hours while people constantly check for messages. (but really, I’m serious, I’d love a pause button)

(2) Give us a bit of time, hell, even 24 hours will do.

(3) Open the floodgates so we can start talking about something other than G+ on G+.

Oh and by the way….good job.

Meta: so I started writing this post as a message in G+, it got longer and after I hit “Share” I realized, wait, this is a blog post! G+ is a very natural platform for blogging and having discussion automatically integrated in. Of course, right now, its quite the gated community. Hopefully one of the first things Google enables is some kind of API that allows us to push posts out to wordpress and twitter. Ideally this would only happen when selected and would be outgoing only. Buzz is the place to import from the outside world in my opinion.

If you’ve come from my other blog Pop the Stack then you are probably of a bit more political bent,  you might be surprised to learn that this is a debate between Noam Chomsky (yes, that Noam Chomsky, everyone has their own Noam Chomsky and they’re all the same person, sort of like the Queen) and the head of Google research Peter Norvig.

I’m going to put up links to the parts I see and add commentary later, I don’t think this is a going to die off soon, especially with a cluster of AI conferences coming over the next few months, so stay tuned.

The Beginning

It all began with the MIT’s Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium on May 3,-5 2011. The initial review of the event from MIT TechReview. Hopefully there will be a video at some point, doesn’t MIT videotape everything?

One theme of the discussion that has garnered attention is summarized here in this statement by Marvin Minsky:

“You might wonder why aren’t there any robots that you can send in to fix the Japanese reactors,” said Marvin Minsky, who pioneered neural networks in the 1950s and went on to make significant early advances in AI and robotics. “The answer is that there was a lot of progress in the 1960s and 1970s. Then something went wrong. [Today] you’ll find students excited over robots that play basketball or soccer or dance or make funny faces at you. [But] they’re not making them smarter.”

Norvig’s Response

Sufficed to say Minksy’s statement is not how a lot of researchers would characterize the current state or the recent advances in the field. Peter Norvig explains the problem much more clearly than I or most people could hope to.  If you aren’t familiar with Peter Norvig then he literally wrote The Book on modern AI with Stuart Russell and he is also the director of research at Google. Be sure to read the comment section there is some real intelligent debate there as well as a little bit of flaming.

Commentary

Here’s a great commentary by Mark Liberman on Norvig’s response (he mostly agrees) and support for his characterization of Chomsky’s views.

Discussion

Or perhaps you’d like to hear what philosophy of linguistics people think of the discussion?

Oh, Reddit has a great debate going on.

More to come…

We aren’t “just” machines. Rather, we are machines, full stop.

We should be proud of it or at least accept it.  That way, when the machines that we’ve built can do everything we can we won’t feel any  more threatened or surprised than when our children grow up to be normal adults capable of everything we are.

For a great debate about the state of AI research and where it is (or isn’t) going you must take a read of this post by Peter Norvig.

Tau the line

First, today is π day, celebrate mathematics and the beautiful wonder of nature!  But could π be…wrong? π of course, is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to this circumference and a snazzy number to throw out in Divinci Code-esque thriller novels.  It has an air of magic and mysticism which mathematics is actually full of.  But only a few such numbers and equations break through the collective consciousness to the general non mathematical public: π, E=MC²,  imaginary numbers

So that’s why tau manifesto is so interesting. It’s a very well written and entertaining piece about geometry, history and π. It lays out the case that π is actually not the most natural number to use for circles. It’s not that π i

s wrong, its that its awkward and that in fact τ, pronounce ‘tau’, is actually more natural.  τ is simply π times two.  This simple change actually simplifies a lot of what was tricky about advanced geometry in highschool and it has implication for how formulas are written in many fields of science given that π shows up in a lot of equations about the working of the universe.  So, after reading the whole thing, I’m a believer, if only for how it might make teaching geometry a little less painful for students. So while Pi Day is nice, on June 28 I’ll be celebrating Tau Day too. And like the author says, if you enjoyed the baked pie on Pi Day, you’ll love Tau Day, it has twice as much pie!

Big-O No!

The other teaching topic I thought of today is probably one someone has already done.  If you are a computer/physics/math nerd you owe it to yourself to be addicted to the great XKCD webcomic. It’s really got some great stuff and almost all the jokes or comments require some significant knowledge of math, programming, statistics or science.  When teaching computer science it is very easy to get separated from the reason we are teaching various theoretical concepts, algorithms and analysis techniques. It usually can be grounded down to preparing students to be better programmers or modellers or to give them the grounding needed to understand other courses later on where they can get computers to do truly cool things.  However, it’s often difficult to make that connection for students before they actually know how those cool things work

But how about these learning goals? They are fun, easy to evaluate and provide clear goals to students in that they are total gibberish before the course and funny jokes afterwards.

1) After successfully completing this course on optimization you will…understand why this is funny.

And be able to explain why its funny, or at least supposed to be funny.  We won’t deduct marks if you don’t laugh, but we will judge you

2) After this course on complexity theory you will understand why the following comics are funny:

3) Unix Tools:

I’m there are lots more. If you can think of one put it in the comments <XKCDNumber> : <Course Topic>

We were talking about Watson around the ol’ AI research lab today and someone pointed out that Watson is yet another highly tailored solution to a particular problem just like DeepBlue (click it, its Arcade Fire, just CLICK IT) was for chess. It’s using a lot of brute force and some reasoning but it’s still not solving the same problem humans are and the domain is somewhat restricted.

Now the interesting difference is that whereas chess is a deterministic game where you can search for an optimal strategy, jeopardy has layers of uncertainty hidden behind human language and the behaviour of other players. So while it’s not a very realistic setting for general AI, and doesn’t claim to be, it has stepped over an important threshold from deterministic, logic based problems to ones that require reasoning under uncertainty and statistics.

This is very fitting as the field of AI research itself has gone through the same change in focus in the past 20 years as outlined very well by Peter Norvig recently. When I took my undergraduate AI classes in the 90s I fell in love with prolog and logical planning. That’s why I went into AI research later.

When I got to grad school I found out that during my undergrad AI courses I had been missing a renaissance that had been occurring which led to modern machine learning and probabilistic AI. Watson’s achievement is only possible with these new methods and the raw computing power increases we have had over the same period.

But  apparently it did also have one other advantage. As many people have speculated, the machine did seem to have a buzzer advantage. According to op-ed by Ken Jennings himself, Watson’s speed with the buzzer was decisive in making up for questions it got wrong.  Is this just sour grapes? Maybe just a little, you need some ego to be an intense competitor like Jennings, but I think he has a point. As I pointed out yesterday the quick reaction time between making the decision to buzz and registering a button press is something a machine can clearly be faster at. Is this what winning at Jeopardy means?

It shouldn’t be.

Winning should mean the ability to answer complex questions, with ambiguous meanings, under time pressure while making the best strategic betting choices.  That is the task Watson performed admirably at. It could have had a buzzer delay and read the screens with computer vision rather than receiving a text file to parse and perhaps it still would have won.

But we’ll never know now.

So you won this round Watson. And you’re impressive (well, the engineering team that built ‘you’ is impressive actually). Hopefully everyone has learned a bit about AI and hopefully some young girls or boys will be inspired to consider computer science or engineering that otherwise wouldn’t have.

But next year…next year you should come back and put it all the table.  Play it our way, the human way, you have the capability to at least try. And may the best machine, be they biological or electronic, win.

Team Human Advantages (#teamhuman)

• Using the most advanced computational system ever encountered, which has been under intense development for millions of years, the Human Brain. It has more raw computational power than Watson, can handle almost infinitely more parallelization and dynamic linking, is incredibly robust to new information and has pattern recognition heuristics which we are only barely beginning to comprehend. Its hard to underestimate how big an advantage this is and its hard to judge it, this is why it seems like a good problem for AI research.
• They understand language – Watson does not understand language at all. It knows some things about language patterns and has learned how to match words and phrases for answers to other words and phrases which are questions for Jeopardy, and only Jeopardy. If a topic shows up which is has not seen much then it does not know what to do. Since it doesn’t understand language it can’t make the kind of leaps of reasoning that the humans can. This is why the topics are restricted to types of topics that have shown up on Jeopardy before, nothing that requires Trebek to explain the meaning of the question.

Watson Advantages (#teamwatson)

• A huge memory database of facts which are relevant to jeopardy questions – its hard to say if this is more facts than Ken Jennings has in his head, it’s represented very differently but humans have amazing heuristics for accessing data quickly and linking it together. But perhaps Watson has an edge here.
• A totally focussed system designed and optimized for years just to play Jeopardy (against most of us this is an advantage, against Ken Jennings and … its questionable who has spent more time training for these games)
• Question sent as a text file – this really could be a bit of an advantage, the computer still needs to scan the text, parse it and analyze it.  The humans need to analyse the visuals and simultaneously listen to Alex Trebek describe the question, of course humans are very good at that kind of thing, Watson is not.
• No video questions – ya, that’s just not on, you want to see a machine fail at something? I’ll show you my toaster trying to cook lasagna, we’re just not there yet.
• Button pressing – it’s not clear exactly how Watson’s button actuator works. And how does Watson know it is allowed to press the button if its not listening to Trebek? It’s possible it has an ‘unfair’ fast reaction time to the humans, I don’t know.

So while this is a fascinating challenge and should demonstrate to everyone how far Artificial Intelligence research has come, everyone should keep in mind that Watson is not Data or Skynet, in fact it’s not even Wall-E.

Watson has been trained to play Jeopardy. It has the ability to answer questions and find data in a much more natural manner than was possible even 5 years ago. But it is not playing the same game that Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter are. Maybe next year.

My advice for next year’s challenge

Oh you know there will be one, Jeopardy ratings are through the roof! The engineers at IBM should make efforts to remove these complaints of unfairness in the following ways:

• (1) Let us see Watson’s button – Ahem, you know what I mean. Put a robot out there or something more visual to let Watson press the button. Also, do some work with people who understand the human body to make sure it isn’t unfairly fast. How long does it take for a human being to physically press a button from the moment they ‘decide’ to press it? It may seem like a handicap to add this delay to Watson but it really would seem more fair. After all, we want to know that Watson is winning on the questioning answering part of the game, not these physical details, so remove them as issues.
• (2) Give Watson a camera – Watson really could visually parse the questions to know what they are. At the beginning of the round it would scan the topics visually and build a database to start planning.  This shouldn’t be hard as visual text analysis is quite advanced, it wasn’t added because it was a needless complication of an engineering problem. But the optics, excuse the pun, are not good in terms of fairness.
• (3a) Get rid of all talking – Lock each player in a room, they wouldn’t hear Alex Trebek, they’ll all just read the questions.  When another contestant answers this should be sent via text file to all the other players. Then it would be fair…but boring and weird.
• OR
• (3b) Give Watson speech recognition – This will be a real problem as speech recognition is one of those areas that really has turned out to be harder than anyone imagined. Vision? No Problem. Text analysis? Give me enough text and I will move the Earth. Robotic control? Are you kidding? Easy. But understanding human speech transmitted through a vibrating air column, damn that’s hard.

  But they should do it, they could use the latest technology available for this, which IBM is generally recognized to lead anyways, and just let it be the machine’s achilles heal.  It could train on Alex Trebek’s Canadian accent (no French Alex!) It could train on its opponents and it could nail the common and simple prompts that the host gives when it is it someone’s turn to play or to break for commercials. It could just ignore Trebek reading the question out except for the cue that it is time to press the button. It may still not do much better at taking advantage of  wrong answers by opponents and it would likely make some entertaining mistakes, but it would make it more realistic. Paradoxically it might get more credit for losing in this way than it will in winning the way it is currently set up.

So if humanity loses tonight, don’t fret. This machine is just a step along the way and sometimes things aren’t as smart as they first seem. Then again, you could also say its holding by not even trying to do everything at once. Would you be more scared/impressed if Watson really did everything its human opponents did and still faired well?

On to round three.

They spent a lot of time explaining the way Watson was built and even gave a high level discussion of the fact that the system maintains a belief distribution over possible answers.  When the computer answers a question we see its top three picks with the probability weight on each answer and the threshold for buzzing in.

The first round was impressive with Watson dominating the first few minutes.  It answered quickly and flawlessly until the first commercial break. It seemed that the humans just weren’t fast enough.

But after the commercials it got interesting. Ken Jennings seemed to modify his strategy to simply press the button as early as possible.  It was clear he buzzed in several times having no idea what the answer was, then stalled for a moment and guessed, usually correctly.  This was a smart adaptation to Watson’s algorithm.  The computer won’t answer unless it is confident in its answer. But a human can keep thinking after they buzz in and gamble that they can come up with something.

Interestingly when Ken buzzed in very early the answers showing on the screen for Watson seemed to be lower quality, it still hadn’t converged on a good answer and froze at the buzzer.

At one point Ken buzzed in and got it wrong, then Watson buzzed in. We could see that its top answer was the same wrong answer Ken just gave, but it repeated it anyways.  This seems to indicate the algorithm does not keep computing after the buzzer and can’t take into account the answers of other players. A minor thing to change really.

The round ended with Watson answering the last question, correctly identifying the Event Horizon of a black hole. Fitting I think.

We’ll see what happens tonight.

What do you think about the challenge, leave your observations in the comments. If you are on twitter make sure to pick a side: Are you rooting for #teamhuman or #teamwatson?

This does a real disservice to America’s youth and is one more reason that I just can’t see America continuing to dominate the world for a another generation. Every other schoolkid coming out of highschool and university around the world won’t have any doubts about the effectiveness of science and how to apply it.

Anyways, I hope that at least these teachers at least have the sense of fairness to ensure that their doubt filled, “its-not-true-unless-I-feel-comfortable-with-it” generation of students are aware of these other well known scientific ‘controversies’ which were, in their time, sometimes even more vitriolic. Suggest other controversies in the comments section:

• Where is the centre of the solar system? Kepler and Gallileo say it’s the Sun. But his infallible eminence the Holy Father says it’s the Earth just like the Bible never mentions anywhere. What do you think? It is a little strange to imagine us going around the Sun when it clearly goes around us in the sky everyday isn’t it? Especially since the Moon does go around us. Ha ha ha, well, isn’t the world funny? You need to decide for yourself what you believe.
• How do we ‘see’ the world around us? Why is it that we only see when our eyes are open? Is it because light is bouncing around the world off of every object and flows into our eyes? Can the thin layer of skin over our eyes really stop electromagnetic radiation that scientists say travelling at 300,000,000 metres for second? Some people, like Isaac Newton, thought that we actually emit light out of our eyes which instantly bounces off the world around us and lets us see. It seems to work right? And just imagine, if we all closed our eyes, then the room would go completely dark. That’s funny isn’t it. Well…maybe its true.  Isaac Newton was kinda smart.
• Where does heat come from? Some scientists say that heat is the result of the vibration of tiny particles inside all matter. This motion is different than general movement. So this ruler doesn’t heat up just because I wave it in the air but because its ‘atoms’ are vibrating in tiny,tiny,tiny,tiny motions back and forth. Sounds a little complicated, huh? Well, there’s another theory that lots of people believe, who are now all dead. They thought heat is actually caused by an invisible liquid that is all around us called caloric. When more caloric flows into something it heats up and when the caloric flows out the object cools down. That’s why your hot cup of coffee will cool down over time as the caloric flows out into the room. That’s makes sense doesn’t it? Well, this theory has some problems explaining why water boils but hey, you need to make up your own minds. Why not try building your own calorimeter and spending your whole life trying to recreate established experiments so you can see it with your own eyes. That’s the only way you’ll know for sure.

And remember kids, there is no right answer here. The world is whatever you think it is or what your parents drill into your head it is since you were born. As long as they don’t sue me, I frankly don’t care.

Alright class, that’s all for today, tomorrow’s class will be the science of candy, “How do they get the caramel into the Caramilk bar?” Can Science provide an answer?

I’ll add interesting links to my AINews list on the side of this page but for a fantastic source of all things AI check out this list from AAAI which is actually maintained using AI algorithms to combine reader reviews and natural language searches of the web.

First up, Robots.

Robert Silverberg recently decided to pine about the good ‘ol days with his Science Writer breathren about what they thought the ‘robots of the future’ would look like and how its really turned out.  It’s an interesting read from a great SF writer and gives a wonderful overview of the history of robots in fiction.

His conclusion essentially comes down to reminding roboticists to be sure to instill Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics into all their machines lest they suffer the dire threat of lawsuits in the future.

The notion of  responsibility is indeed an important one that AI researchers will need to deal with.  Right now all robots and machines are pretty dumb no matter how smart they seem.  There is no computer on Earth with anything remotely resembling free will or self-awareness. Thus there is no way any machine could be blamed for its actions at this time so any errors are either the result of improper usage, bad planning by engineers or the random outcome of rules that no one had a problem with.

You can already begin to see this in the way Google, for example, responds to criticism about what shows up on their search results.  Their algorithms are complex and seeks patterns amongst huge amounts of data that no human can see.  They use a lot of AI algorithms and the particular results that show up when you search for something really aren’t the cause of what any one person at Google has done.  Google put up the system which allows those results to be generate but whether the results are offensive for one particular query isn’t something any human being made a decision about.
So I think Google would have a strong argument that some result which was offensive and somehow caused harm wasn’t their fault as long as they’ve taken reasonable precautions.

I think the next stage of moral responsibility for machine behaviour will be something similar to the responsibility of a dog owner for the actions of their dog. A dog owner is at the park walking their dog and the dog is running free and hurts a child or another dog.  The dog did the action and will likely be punished or put  down, but you can’t sue the dog.  However, depending on how the situation arose the owner has some responsibility. If the dog is usually nice and friendly, it was a small dog, it was a leash free park etc, then perhaps the owner would have no legal liability at all.  On the other extreme an abusive dog owner who raises a mean spirited dog that often attacks others and then released it in a leash-only park would face serious penalties although still likely less than if they performed the attack themselves.  I don’t know what the laws are but there is a reasonable way to write such laws that the owner can be held responsible but where the independent will of the dog itself is considered.

Someday, Isaac willing, someone will create a computer that begins to approach the level of complexity that we could say the engineers who made it can only be held as responsible for its actions as they are for their dog. While the Three Laws of Robotics are a nice idea they may be no easier to hardwire than how you train your dog not to bark at others and to always come when you call.  

So lets keep the intent of the three laws but lets make sure that when that day comes we’ve raised a nice, friendly dog rather than an uncontrollable pit bull.

Update: more detail here

You may remember that computer’s have now defeated the greatest human players of chess inspiring endless punditry and loose discussion about ‘thinking’ machines as well as inspiring awesome Arcade Fire songs. Computers are also now quite good at playing poker, have solved Checkers completely (no point playing that anymore…), provide us with frustrating ‘automated phone help’ bots and regularly vacuum the floors of geeks fairly adequately.

Sigh. Perhaps this is why the New York Times article, which is otherwise pretty clear and non-hyperbolic about the next spectacle, felt the need to throw this in:

Despite more than four decades of experimentation in artificial intelligence, scientists have made only modest progress until now toward building machines that can understand language and interact with humans.

Now, I’m an Artificial Intelligence researcher, so I’ll try to be rational about this sentence.

The first half of the sentence refers to the common observation that four decades of research into AI has not produced walking,m talking androids trying to take over the world and consume us for power.  Instead it had provided tremendous research gains and advances in technology that underly  many aspects of our modern world from google to space probes, from self-driving cars to face detecting auto-focus cameras, from management of complex energy systems to medical diagnostic tools.  The second half the sentence points out that on the problem everyone on the street really cares about, walking talking androids that can ‘think’ like us and understand what we’re saying…that progress has been below society’s ridiculously high expectations.

Granted. Voice recognition has got a lot better over the years but not up to say, the 4 year old child level. But you know, we don’t even really understand how our own brains work, that makes simulating one in a less complex computing machine that the one between our ears, you know, tricky.  (A separate approach that may outflank current AI might in fact be just building an equally complex simulation of a brain and letting it go, but that’s another post.)

But I love these public spectacles, they provide a chance to explain the current level of AI and open up some of the ideas of computation in the problem that are used in more relevant applications all around us.  Having a computer up on t.v. with Alex Trebek and other contestants will be fun and we probably won’t even have the embarrassing situation Mr. Kasparov was in of the computer beating the human, not yet anyways.

It will be entertaining, some of it will be funny and hopefully some of it will be informative to viewers who live in an increasingly computational world.  Playing jeopardy well is a much harder problem than playing chess well.  The challenges it requires in terms of understanding language, meaning, searching databases, forming sentences and making strategic decisions about bids and questions are all very rich domains that have more real world application than the way chess playing programs work which is generally some kind of brute force search.

I just hope when the computer loses, the show is over and they ship the computer back to IBM labs we don’t hear another round of  ”why such modest progress”?  This ain’t rocket science people, its a lot harder than that.

The traditional form of celebration is to play video games (or Settlers), drink strong coffee spiked with Bailey’s, sing ‘Daisy Bell’ and send a Happy New Year’s email to all your friends and family (scripted three hours earlier, of course, to be sent at midnight so that your game won’t be interrupted).

Happy New Year Nerds

I understand why Twitter does this, to encourage discover of novel trends and churn discussion.  But its misleading to simply have that list and hope everything understands.  What they really need is two trends lists. One using the current Trending Topics algorithm and another that simply lists the top 10 terms.  This Top Actual Trends list would not change much.  Likely “bieber” would always be on it.  Probably too would be “sex” and “food”.  But it would be possible to make a simple list that excludes common words from speech but gave and idea of the main topics being discussed.  Seeing the two lists side by side would remove the confusion. It would also mean that when the Actual Trending Topics list changed, or a new term appeared on it for the first time (that could even be highlighted, or the number of weeks on the chart could be listed) then it really would be news.  It would mean that something new was going on.  At least we wouldn’t feel like the real discussion was being ignored.  As it is the TT is becoming meaningless.

This is the time of year  when we all make a little effort to send a gift to our family and close friends.  Other friends get maybe card and no gift and that’s fine too, we aren’t all made of money and getting  good gift for people we know really well is hard enough.  But these days we also have a lot of ‘friends’ who may miss out on that card for whatever reason yet still deserve something.

Maybe you haven’t actually met and talked to them in years, or ever. You don’t even have their address but you see them on Facebook from time to time and you even chat once in a while or comment on their status or a link they posted.  They are more than acquaintances, you feel a connection. But they aren’t the friends you hang out with, at least not right now.  Let’s call them ffriends.

What is the proper way to let them know what they mean to you?  A broadcast post on your Facebook  wall is too little. It makes no distinction between family, friends,  ffriends and real acquaintances who you don’t really know but have ‘friended’ for whatever reason.

An individual e-card or Facebook message is too much, maybe you don’t really have enough to say to each ffriend individually and there could be lots of them.  But you do have some kind of connection. You like the occasional news about your ffriend’s lives. You like chatting with them and you maybe you hope that someday they become (or return to being) friends rather than just ffriends.

So here’s the idea. Sometime this holiday season put up a wall post something like the following:

My family and close friends get all the attention. But I just wanted to let you all know, that even though we don’t see each other much in the real world, haven’t met in years or have never met at all, I appreciate the connection that we do have and hope it grows in the future: @bobwhatisname @thatguyfromstarbucks @amyfromhighschool @louthemechanic @ericmythirdcousin @guyfromlastjob

Merry Holidays

Wouldn’t that be nice?  You need to do it right. Think about the wording and think carefully about the people you put on it.  Someone who thinks you are best buds in real life may not appreciate this, but then again, if its done with a positive tone maybe it will clarify a relationship.  You also don’t want to be too restrictive, go through your friend list and add everyone who isn’t an acquaintance and then take off people who you are sending a christmas card.

For me, there are loads of people I’ve got in touch with on Facebook who I haven’t seen in years.  We don’t actually talk that much but I appreciate them and hope to see them in the real world if the stars align properly.  Then there are other people I’ve never even met before. I know them as an issue or idea that we have in common, from a  discussions in a groups or through mutual friends.  These people would be pleasantly surprised to be added to an explicit list of people in this way. It would just be nice to give them all a nudge and say,

‘hey, you know, I notice you and I’m glad we’re having the connection we are having. Even if it is limited right now. Maybe, someday it will become more.  But either way, have a nice holiday. ok?’

Twitter actually has something like this every week.  Every friday tweeters post a #followfriday message, something like:

These are the ones, great tweeps #ff @mrawesome @msawesome @erictheguy @mikethedude @nancythefancy @jillthethrill

I have actually been arguing that follow friday needs to become more selective because many people just post multiple tweets with lists and lists of everyone they feel any connection to whatsoever.  This makes follow friday more of the shout out rather than the original intent of helping people find good tweeps to follow.  On follow friday I always try to limit myself to one person who was extra great that week as advice for anyone who cares to consider following them.  But my suggestion for the First Annual Holiday FFriend Shout Out is pretty much exactly how #followfriday works right now on twitter. But just once a year.

So, you know. Go do that.  If you like.  I think I will, now that I’ve suggested it and everything.

Now, in English…

Anonymous is an adhoc protest pseudonym taken on by various people on the internet.  It relates to the movie V for Vendetta but basically captures the idea of a assigning a generic identity to a faceless mass of people all acting for a common purpose.  There is no known central organizing person for protests by Anonymous but its not surprising that the WikiLeaks conflict would draw people to using the identity since it involves technology, freedom of information and speech.

A Denial of Service attack (DoS) is probably the simplest form of attack there is on a website or computer system.  It doesn’t require any hacking or breaking of codes. The attack simply directs a large amount of traffic to a website or server all at the same time in order to overload the system and bring it down.  In the simplest form this could be thousands of people agreeing to point their webrowser at the offending website at exactly some time of day.  Usually these attacks are actually carried out in a more automatic way using a botnet.

A botnet is a term used to describe a network of computers usually taken over with viruses and other destructive software.  A botnet might be used to scour credit card databases, attack company or government servers or host porn or marketing website content.  The Operation Payback botnet is interesting because people have voluntary installed software on their computer to allow it to be used to orchestrate attacks on organizations seen at undermining WikiLeaks.  People joining such a network should be aware that the actions being undertaken by those directing their computer could easily be construed as illegal, even terrorist attacks.  It is not clear that individuals joining such a botnet would be free from prosecution and they cannot hope that their machine ip and identity will be hidden by the people centrally running it.  However, for law enforcement authorities the truth is also that this kind of attack can’t really be stopped. Just as sharing information is virally unstoppable these kind of attacks can always be reinitiated even if you take down the people centrally running this particular one.  Just as legal attacks on music piracy have led to ever more subtle and unstoppable file sharing schemes like torrents, a concerted effort to restrict organizing and protest of this kind will likely only lead to evolution of more decentralized and unstoppable forms via natural selection.

Note: If there are other computer/technology terms being thrown around regarding the WikiLeaks story (or any story) and Wikipedia isn’t doing it for you, then let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best.

World Info War I

This has been called the first InfoWar, I don’t know what that means, but it seems to have started already. WikiLeaks has had its websites attacked by mass Denial of Service attacks since the news broke.  These could be arranged by governments or groups of loosely organized people with lots of computers, or even one person with access to lots of computers.

Next, WikiLeaks has been having trouble staying afloat as the various companies they depend on abandon them.  Most are dropping WikiLeaks as clients based on reasons unrelated to the content of WikiLeaks. Companies such as Paypal have used language in their contract about illegal content to drop them.  Their internet service providers and DNS hosts have dropped them due to high load.  Their bank in Switzerland has now dropped them due to an inaccurate living address.This article is a great analysis of what this reveals about some of the core functionality of the new internet, cloud computing in particular.

The counter-attack has apparently now begun as their Swiss bank and Paypal have now come under attack by hackers who are taking the InfoWar ralying cry to heart.

So how does this end? There is apparently still a lot of data to be released and the recent batch of sensitive security cables seems to indicate WikiLeaks is applying almost no filtering on what data is useful or dangerous.  They have also implied that all this data is actually already released in the form an encrypted file that many people have already downloaded.  All Assange needs to do is say the password to a reporter or to anyone with a twitter account and the data will all be release en masse, all at once.

Info War N

I think the most interesting thing about this from a technological point of view is that Assange himself and WikiLeaks are sort of irrelevant at this point. Even if he is arrested tomorrow and convicted of many crimes and WikiLeaks is shut down, this won’t be over.  First of all, there is that encrypted file, if it exists.  How do you punish someone who can still blackmail you with a single password.  But beyond that what WikiLeaks has demonstrated is that we have passed a point of no return for controlling information.  The only way to keep  a secret is to not tell anyone.  But if you communicate electronically and share this with anyone then the data will be stored in many places you cannot control and eventually, someone can release it.  The thing that has changed since Deep Throat in the 60s is that ‘releasing it’ is now super easy.

Assange is no super hacker, he has no magic that allows him to do this.  He just has the information and had to will to push this through and publisize it. But any kid with a computer could do what he’s doing if they had the data.  Many people with secrets around the world may just now be realizing that the information they have real power.  The technologies of  the web, email, social media and encryption are now core utilities of the internet that cannot be shut down by anyone.  They can be tracked, they can be watched, they can be tapped.  But the moment one is dropped another will pop up.  Some country will host you, somewhere else will also host a new site.  The new link will be shared on Facebook or Twitter or via email, publisizing is free now.  The data can even be stored in public view so that the keeper of the secret knows you have the goods yet can’t actually find all the copies to delete them.  Yet, if you don’t release the password, then the secret isn’t really out and only the NSA can probably break it.  Maybe this has been happening for years, but the public level of this changes a lot.

These technologies are now all very accessible and used by millions of people every day. What this means is that the next WikiLeaks doesn’t need to be anyone with an organization or a degree or even money.  Information is so liquid, so viral now that it literally can’t be stopped once it’s let out of the box.  So the only options for those keeping secrets are to make sure nothing ever leave the box again (ie. only have face to face voice conversations in soundproof booths), turn off the internet or stop keeping secrets.

I’m not sure this is a good thing, secrets can have their place, people are not always good at handling the unvarnished truth.  But you should expect more of it in the future no matter what happens to WikiLeaks.  The age of the endless Info War may be upon us.

Anyways.  The point is, this sunday is Pan-Galactic 42 Day.  So how should we bloggers celebrate or mark this occasion?  I have a proposal, and don’t worry this one doesn’t have anything to do with political parties making bold and visionary (thus highly unlikely) agreements like most of my proposals.

This proposal is simple. This sunday, on your blog, release a post to be added to that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The post should be on the topic your blog normally discusses with the aim of opening the eyes of the shortsighted humans on Earth who usually have no interest in galactic matters.  I will, of course, be writing a summary of the many different, and surprisingly progressive, democratic systems used by other planets in the galaxy and beyond.  How do the Silastic Armorfiends choose their Senators?  How do the sentient matresses of Squornshellous Zeta select their chief negotiator for the next year’s mattress culling?  What kind of voting system allowed Zaphod Beeblebrox to become president of the galaxy? And how many sub-triplicate forms do the Vogons needs to fill out to exercise their franchise?  All this and more will be revealed on Sunday.  And you should get writing your own poignant H2G2 entry for 42 Day as well,  this might help .

On the surprising chance that anyone reads this and actually does it I’d be happy to add links to your 42 day blog on this page, but you probably stopped reading this when I got to the Armour Fiends.  Stupid humans.

42 Day Blogs

• Democracy Around the Galaxy: A Hitchhiker’s Guide

It is completely redundant to say “You can tweet us on Twitter at  …”.  Well that’s nice, exactly where else could I tweet you?  Either people know what Twitter is and can tweet you, or they don’t know what Twitter is and now you’re just confusing them.  Depending on which of these people you care about more you should say one of the following:

• “You can tweet us at …”
• OR “You can contact us via Twitter at …”

You see? This isn’t confusing or redundant and the second one has the advantage of letting people know that Twitter is a communication system rather than a “tweeting system”, whatever the hell that is.

Think about how silly this redundancy is in terms of other communication media, it’s exactly like saying:

• “You can email us using you email program at …”
• “You can call us with a telephone at …”
• “You can write us a letter and mail it to us through the postal system (or a private courier is you desire) at this address…”
• “I spoke to Bob Smith today in our Toronto studio via modulated air vibrations.”

There are words like speak, write, call, email, tweet that tell us what the communication medium is.  If you are worried that not that many people know how to use said medium you can just say “You can also contact through UnfathomableNewTechnology at ….”.

Is that clear? Or do I need to come down and tell you in person via translating my body to your location in physical space?

Even beyond the astounding ignorance of this statement there was a more subtly offensive idea in his point.  He asks us to dismiss any rational attempt to use rigorous methods to analyse the state of our nation.  He implies that somehow, ‘Canadians being nice’ will compensate for the statistical bias they are adding to the census.  Can the Finance Minister quantify how ‘nice’ Canadians are and how willing they are to fill out 40 pages of questions if they don’t have to?  Even if he’s right, the census will be biased towards ‘nice people’ who do something just because they are asked, and who have the time and leisure to do so.

The Damage is Done

This brings up something I haven’t heard anyone mention yet.  The damage is now done.

You see, the original problem with dropping fines for not filling out the census (I never had any problem with dropping jail penalties, since this was never enforced it seems a non-issue issue) was that it would create a huge difference in returns from previous census’ and drop the number of people filling it out in an uneven and unpredictable way.  The new problem we face now, even if the government completely reverses their decision, which seems unlikely, is that the government who is collecting this data has been undermining it and badmouthing the very collection process all summer.  That’s going to influence a lot of people.  I would predict that even if the census were mandatory next year that the number of people not filling it out will actually skyrocket because the government is essentially handing it out to people while winking and whispering ‘nawww, don’t fill it out, it’s all a sham, we have to give it you, but we don’t really want to’.

So Flaherty’s assertion that Canadians will fill out the census if you ask them nicely doesn’t fly, because he’s not asking them at all.  No matter what happens, Statistics Canada is going to need years to rebuild their credibility with any Canadians who have believed the current government’s statements.

Called Out by Nature

In other news (well other census news, ok I’m obsessed) the Conservatives were called out by Nature itself this week.  Not Mother Nature, although I’m sure she’s upset at the Conservatives too, she’s just not very, you know, vocal.  No, the esteemed scientific journal Nature this week put out an unprecedented editorial slamming the Conservative government for scrapping the long form census and undermining statistical data that researchers in Canada and around the world rely on.  This isn’t Maclean’s calling them out, it’s not even some pop science magazine like Scientific American.  This is Nature. This, along with the journal Science, are the big scientific journals for general science.  Every scientist in the world of any stripe will hear about this very soon and shake their heads.  Now, scientists are usually a hard lot to pin down to agree on anything. Look how long it took them to definitively state that human’s were causing global warming. But there are just a few things they ALL will agree on if you ask them (in no particular order)

1. The Earth goes around the Sun
2. Human’s and Apes have common ancestors
3. The entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase over time AND
4. We always need more data, not less; and collecting data without controlling for relevant variables makes that data completely useless

Like asking Canadians, nicely

Please fill out these 40 pages of detailed information, but you know, we wish we didn’t have to, and its kind of intrusive don’t you think? Sorry,  so, try to return it whenever you can, if you feel like it. Thanks

– The New Conservative Government of Canada
– The Government of Canada
– Statistics Canada

A Concession

This week Prime Minister Harper did made a concession on the census but its one that indicates all their arguments are nothing more than diversions.  They added a couple of questions on Quebec language to the still mandatory short census.  This was only hours after a Quebec court agreed to hear a Quebec language group’s complaint that undermining the long-form census would violate laws meant to protect French language rights.  By caving in on this issue the Conservatives are indeed demonstrating that statistical somehow voluntary census collection is fine for most information unless it happens to relate to a voting group that the Conservatives are afraid of or want to get votes out of.

Recommend this Post

So the stats are bound to prove interesting for citizens in lobbying their governments to be more open.

Check it out, then go ask your government to be open about what the requests were for:

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

Oh ya, that’s gonna work out great. I am not against papers trying to implement incremental charges to fund their journalism costs. Nothing comes for free and advertising is not free. But any pay for access system needs to account for how people actually use the internet and how much a single read is worth.

I find articles by searching, linking from aggregator blogs or following links on twitter. So I’m not going to log into a particular newsite, pay $1.50 and then read a whole bunch of articles that day. I might read one article from your site, if its comes to the top in my google news search, or a big blog links to it. But if it asks me to pay I just go back and read an article about the same event from the Guardian or the New York Times. Now maybe they’ll all make me pay, you say. Well, they won’t, if just a few are free they’ll get a lot more readers and their advertising will become profitable.

But lets say a lot of paper do begin to charge in some way. There will be a huge competitive pressure to make that fee small and incremental. The only kind of fee that will work for online news is a per-article fee and it needs to be really small, like one penny small. On top of that it needs to be dead simple to pay, using something everyone already uses, like itunes or amazon. If I could click on a button beside your article that deducts a penny from my itunes account it might stop me from hitting the back button.

I can think of something close to this working for magazines, but not papers. A good magazine, with compelling content could convince me to pay for an entire issue, but it can’t be time limited at all. I’d click a button to get unlimited, nonexpiring access to a single issue of the Economist or New Scientist or Maclean’s, for example. I might even pay $4 or $5 for it. But a newspaper, that’s out of date the next day, and might have one or two articles I want to read? Why in the name of HTTP would I pay $1.50 for that?

Pay for access may be the only to save the credible, professional journalism industry. It can provide a valid add in quality of content for our news over the free blogs that will never go away. So whatever newspapers do to get money for access to their content it must admit they are dealing with fickle (not loyal) readers who have a free alternative that isn’t that much worse just a few clicks away. The amount plus effort you are making people pay must come out less than the effort of finding another source of similar quality. It can be done, but this is not the way to do it.

Discuss this article on Buzz

Just a thought that occurred to me today. People are always eager to predict that science will be ‘pretty much done’ in the next 30 years, answering all the hard questions and progressing at a steady pace. It usually falls short of our expectations and take huge right turns we weren’t expecting, recasting the question in a different form, creating new insights but mostly illuminating how little we truly know (dark matter, dark energy, climate change, neurobiology)

Similarly, people are generally very bad at predicting how far technology will advance in the next 30 years, to the point where often the technology that seemed unrealistic becomes merely mundane by the time ‘the future’ has arrived. And we are usually very bad at predicting exactly what technology will be available.  (cellphones, airplane industry, computers, internet, brain scanning)

So technology predictions should be: I don’t know, but probably nothing anyone has thought of and sooner than you’d think.
While scientific predictions should be: We seem close to solving this so you, know who know’s how long it will take, it may turn out we’re asking entirely the wrong question.

Continue the Conversation on Buzz

This morning I have seen for the first time a number one trend that isn’t just an echo of  a us hashtag game. The tag is #followamuseum which asks everyone to follow their favourite museum (some ideas of museums to follow listed here). If you look at the regions where this is trending right now (10:30AM PST Feb 1,2010) its very interesting:

What’s interesting about this list is not where people care about museums or not. Trends come and go all day long and could be because of other local stories.  The interesting part though is that most Canadians are talking about this trend even though the overwhelming majority of Tweeps worldwide are not.  The trend does not show up on the worldwide list or the US list. So that means the Canadians who saw it and made it a trend here by retweeting or commenting must be watching the Canada trend topics (or the UK).  This is very exciting, as now Canadians can trust that our voice can make it through the defining din of Twitter.

Unlike FaceBook, which has around 14 million Canadian users, thats about 42% of the total Canadian population, twitter has a measly 1% pop covereage. This means that everything Canadians say on twitter is bound to be drowned out by their American and even British peers. Canadian Twitter accounts make up about 5% of Twitter. When something shows up as a trend on twitter (which means its one of the top 10 most popular phrases showing up in all current 140 character messages on Twitter) it pretty much means a lot of Americans are talking about that topic.

But if you look at stats at politwitter.ca, which aggregates Canadian political discussion on Twitter, you’ll see that there are tens of thousands of active Canadians tweeting about politics and following national leaders. That’s not nothing.

A Canadian Voice

So what about little ‘ol us? Last week there were huge national protests and everyone I know was tweeting about it with common tags #noprorogue #CAPP and #cdnpoli.
Some part of me hoped, that just for an hour one of those words would show up on the venerated trending topics list. But it was not to be. Then I looked into it a bit and found the stunning 1%. Add to that the fact that many people register for twitter, don’t get it, and never use it again, so 1% is probably high. Twitter is not as easy to ‘get’ as FaceBook. It doesn’t seem useful to jabber on in short bytes with people you don’t know. But sometimes it can be really powerful. FaceBook is much easier for everyone to udnerstand, you link up with freinds from the real world, chat, play games and generally just keep up to date with their life.

So why is this knowledge important for activities in Canada trying to gain awareness for their cause and rally people and media attention? Its important because the media doesn’t know this, or is too enamored of simple stories to use this information properly. If the reporters and pundits see something trending on Twitter, they’ll see a big thing, Twitter is big right? That’s a story. So how does that help? Well…

Twitter just recently, this week, added a new feature to their website that lets you view trending topics by region. Now, if people can choose to view trends from several countries or large cities. Canada is one of the countries although no Canadian cities are present yet. Right now the trends look pretty much the same as the Worldwide trends except for the presence of the word ‘Canadian’ and ‘Tim Hortons’. Since Canada is such a small group of users (hundreds of thousands rather than millions) that means that getting topics to trend in the Canada view should be much easier than in the default Worldwide view. But for this to happen, Canadians need to add location information so that Twitter knows they are in Canada. I suspect the trends are the same now because most Canadians haven’t put their location down, this may even explain the 1% being so low. Well it turns out now that it really is useful to tell Twitter that you at least live in Canada, even if you don’t want to give more info. This way we can all use the Canada trending topics view to find out what Canadians are really talking about rather than continuing to listen in to our neighours to the south. We’ve listend to them long enough, I think we know what they’re talking about by now.

Instructions on Setting your location in Twitter:

1. go to Twitter.com and sign in
2. Click Settings at the top right
3. You will be on the Account tab, go down to Location and enter Canada
4. Go the bottom of the page and click save

That’s it. Now if you click “Change” under the trending header on the right hand side you can pick the country or city you want to view and your tweets should be included.

Can’t wait to see what we’re talkin aboot.

I’m a programmer and a certified tech geek, so of course I’m playing with Google Wave. I say playing, because there isn’t much you can do at this point on wave except play. This is partly because there aren’t enough people with access to wave yet that communication is useful. But more importantly, there simply isn’t a rich enough feature set yet to commit to using it for anything important. Much has been said elsewhere about what essential features wave needs to have be ready for primetime, including :

• administrative access control – This is needed  over waves so that people can leave, be removed, have their write access restricted or monitored. Essential, showstopper, I assume google is working hard on it right now.
• integration with email – Wave may want to be an email-killer but that won’t be possible without connecting fully with email and showing wave is better, which it may or may not be. So complete back and forth integration with non-wavers via email is essential. If google isn’t working on this, well, they are miscalculating.
• speed and stability – annoying, but wave is still in preview so this will get fixed.

All these things can’t really be fixed until Google decides to do it. But there are a number of other things wave could have right now if developers put their minds to it and made some useful robots, well ok, maybe next week.

Robots in wave in simply little applications that get a user address and can be added to waves to alter the content. This may sound strange but its actually a very powerful idea. Some robots that already have been created add results from twitter to a wave, pass blips (atomic portions of a wave) back and forth to some email address or blog, add smiley faces and convert urls in the text to http links.

Robots seem to be relatively easy to program and are easy to add. Any content a user can see in a wave, the invited robots will see and they can alter it as well. I am interested in making some wavebots of my own but alas it looks like the sands of time will delay that for a while. The problem with the wavebots that exist so far is that most of them are toys and don’t do anything actually useful. I have an idea or two for useful wave robots that I think would be a lot more useful. If you are so inclined and skilled please make these forthwith and let me know.  If you really hadn’t thought it until you read this post, consider it a gift and cite me as your inspiration.  But what I really want is these bots in my contact list, yesterday!

AnnotateBot

We need a robot to highlight and alter keywords in the text so that the document can be used for notetaking and brainstorming. For example:

• TODO, MOVETO(doc), LOOKUP, address, recipe, call, -> becomes an arrow , ? becomes highlighed to denote an as yet unanwered question
• “TODO text….” could become a check box with the text following it. Hopefully even checking the box could cause a formatting change?
• the robot could create a blip at the bottom that shows all the mappings and lets the user alter them or add more
• can you save an instance of the robot as a separate contact? The emaily robot seems to imply you can. If so, then an instance of keywords mappings could be saved in the contact book and readded to later waves. You could have one annotatebot instance for psych class, another for your journal, another for recipes.

SummaryBot

One major problem with wave right now is you can’t collapse parts of a wave and see the structure or the big picture. Replay is cute but frankly its useless for document editing. Its only useful for introducing someone to the flow of a conversation. I see Wave as much more of a collaborative document editing platform. Like Social-google Docs on steroids (without the access control? sheesh). Replay will play a minor role in this view, since the current best doc is what really matter. The fact that there is no way to collapse all repsonse blips or view a timeline is a huge gap. I don’t know if the API allows it, but it might be possible to create a bot that hides or removes parts of the converation below some level in the tree, or creates a summarized copy of the wave that can be perused to get the idea, with links to the full detail in the original wave. Sort of like a table of contents with hyperlinks. That should be doable.

JournalBot

This one would be great. I am already experimenting with using wave for a research journal. It seems ideal, it automatically timestamps each blip, lets you respond and annotate as you go. Lets you go back and edit. Again, collapsing by date would fantastic here. But a wavebot could help a lot with journalling. For example, a bot could take each new blip added at the bottom as a reply and cut and paste the text in to the first main blip so that their is a final formatted document. Each new day could be automatically titled and all new blips entered that day would be appended under that date. Edits of previous blips would not get moved and the header date wouldn’t change. This gets around the limitation that the timestamp on a blip indicated the last edited time, not the creation date. Which is exactly what you want for geenral document editing. But in a journal you also want to know when it was added since edits are largely minor. Any robot that simply turns some key word into the current date or timestamp, with formatting options would be an even simpler solution to this.

The great thing about these bot ideas is they could be combined easily simply by adding each bot to the same wave. Then you could have a journal that annotes TODO comments to format them differently, keeps track of the creation date and lets you explore the document at an abstract level.

I don’t know, is it just me, or wouldn’t these kinds of bots be a better use of your time than developing another smiley bot or eliza-hack chatbot or voting gadget. These are productivity basics that wave needs so it can crawl as a useful tool before it flies as a social media, 21st century email killer.

Those are my ideas.  If you have already made something similar, let me know. If you haven’t, get working on it, before I do!  If its good, then I won’t have to do it myself.

So, that’s the first interesting thing.  The second thing is that there is a theory gaining more and more credibility that Gould’s belt was formed by a cloud of dark matter passing through our galaxy, get this, around 30 million years ago.  If that doesn’t blow you mind you need to go refresh you memory about the ages of planets, stars, galaxies etc.  Thirty million years is literally nothing in astronomical terms.  The dinosaurs died out twice as long ago as this.  Which means the dinosaurs wouldn’t have seen Orion in the sky.  (Of course, the stars also move, so the constellations would have been very different millions of years ago, but these bright stars weren’t even born at that time).  The thing that seems fascinating about it is the possibility that all of these stars were created at once due to the impact of a passing cloud of dark matter.

This is important culturally and scientifically.  Culturally, these bright stars form the backbone of the constellations that were incredibly influential in the formation of human culture.  The Egyptians and the Greeks (for example) would surely have found other things to look at if they were not there, but the sky would have been significantly less interesting without the stars of Gould’s belt.

Scientifically, it turn out that these bright stars may help us locate a nearby cloud of passing dark matter that can be studied because, oh yeah, we have absolutely no idea what dark matter actually is.

Anyways, I just thought it makes a good story, it ties together our modern attempts to understand the makeup of the universe with our ancient attempts to understand the makeup of the universe.  The great Orion  and Perseus may yet lead us to the ultimate Truths.

What Nanos is talking about here is an intuition that opinion polls have a kind of inertia that keeps a party’s support around a certain level until some news or institutional change comes along to upset it.  That seems a reasonable idea, but just like financial markets, detecting that we are currently in one of these steady periods is much easier to determine in hindsight than at the moment.  To speculate that two weeks of polls at some level indicate a new level of support does not match the evidence of how much variance there can be over the long wrong in party support.  This is especially true for a period that saw a momentary public certainty that an election was imminent, strong evidence of an economic turnaround that may well change like the wind again in weeks to come and the unprecedented humanizing spectacle of the prime minister playing the Beatles on piano.  I would think this couple weeks are very likely to be an anomaly given these events.  But it doesn’t matter what I think, when the head of a company conducting these polls expresses that opinion it carries more weight and makes me wonder if preconceived ideas are entering into the polls that political pundits rely on so heavily to have something to talk about.

Personally I think its completely inappropriate for pollsters to speculate on where trends are going, they should behave as analytical statisticians who describe in an unbiased manner where we are now and what we can say with a large degree of certainty about the present data given historical trends.  This loose talk of a ‘new norma’ is unscientific, biasing towards future polls and makes one wonder at the non-partisan nature of the polling process itself.

I have several responses and comments to add to it. On losing experts with peripheral intellectual vision (my new favourite phrase):

For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite suddenly, to the well-prepared mind.

The question for humanity is, is there an alternative to this source of innovation? Perhaps the online interconected mind?

So we decry the increasing compartmentalization of knowledge – knowing more and more about less and less – while awaiting the great syntheses that some day may be achieved by millions of linked minds, all with fingertip access to the world’s codified knowledge but with a globe-spanning spectrum of different perspectives.

There is an assumption amongst many open-source and open-knowledge advocates that there is an equivalence between lots of information memorized and indexed in one mind and 10 times or 100 times more information, stored online with many thousands of individuals processing and modifying it.  This is the kind of thing Google likes to push forward. Its a compelling idea, if a little frightening, that each of us as individuals becomes something like a neuron in a brain and contributes to an even more complex system.  But it is far from clear that this online ‘mind’ would be anywhere near as complex as a single human brain. If the data on the internet is not linked together and processed in a dynamic way then how would anything new ever be discovered from it?  Wikipedia and Google’s databases are dead data with human interpretation.  The new and stunningly ambitious Wolfram Alpha search engine would pipe up here that they are actually processing this data.  But I think they are overstating their tool. They are really just automatically compiling statistics on the fly that will be useful to human beings, this is very different from the level of thought that is needed to connect the dots in the internet’s constellations of data.

I see two interesting futures for knowledge and data in this context:

1. an online ‘mind’ (or at least a problem solving, data access system) which we are a part of but which is not us. As individuals we will likely not understand it and progress could slow since so many people will spend time gathering lots of general knowledge and being ‘links’ in the global brain rather than actually understanding anything deeply.  If the network itself doesn’t pick up the slack in innovation then human progress could slow.  In order to pick up this slack would require an active intelligence that could process all this knowledge such as those prophesied by singularity theorists or else one that weaves together the conversations and thoughts of billions of connected human beings.
2. alternatively, we might converge towards a world of experts where no one knows everything but everyone knows a few things very deeply.  If communication is efficient between different types of experts and people learn to explain the essence of a solution quickly to nonexperts we could enter  into a golden age of collaboration that could be very productive.  This would not require a supermind to gather all the data on the internet and would encourage individuals to continue to acquire knowledge and to our brains for what they are good for: abstract analysis, analogies and intuition rather than storage of raw data.

Mr. Nicholson worries that the first case will occur (probably without the AI saviour) but I think the second case is more likely.

He ends with a fantastic quote:

Those of us who are still skeptical might recall that Plato, in the Phaedrus, suggested that writing would “create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it.”

which reminds me of a fantastic comic by Dresden Codak which contained a satirical story about the changes coming upon us. It references the singularity specifically but is relevant to this less extreme technology transition as well. Its written as a translation of a cave painting during an ancient transition of humanity in the face of exponentially expanding technological progress, the invention of the bow and arrow and writing.  Just a reminder that people have always and will always be afraid of change they don’t understand. But also a reminder that all changes are not necessarily good changes and its best not to throw out tried and true methods before their replacement is out of beta.

Twitter has been around a little while now, perhaps it is even becoming mature, and certain patterns of usage are beginning to make themselves clear. Retweeting, the practice of forwarding on an interesting tweet to one’s followers, has become standard and will soon be added by Twitter on their main site.

Another phenomenon that has entrenched itself is spam messages.  This isn’t surprising, every new communication medium quickly develops its own sort of junk mail.  Luckily in the electronic world it is easier to take action against junk marketers than in the real world.  Email spam filters have advanced tremendously, if you use a webmail service you should very rarely see spam in your inbox anymore.  Twitter, unfortunately, is still in its golden age of spam with no filters instituted by the twitter servers and few third party services that help.  So far I have noticed a few types of spam on twitter and for all of them there is a solution that each and every one of us can help with until Twitter gets its act together and institutes some system to deal with it.

1. Spam Followers – Everyone on twitter is familiar with this type of spam, you get a message that you have been followed by @luciousVelvet, you look them up and see they have zero followers and either 1 following or thousands.  The entire point of these accounts is to follow people and have a direct line to feeding through adds for their porn website or russian made cellphone offers.  The best outcome for them is for you to have ‘autofollow’ on and then their messages show up in your feed.
   Twitter solution 1 : Disable the ability to autofollow, its a dead feature.
   User Solution 1: While you are trying to make out how @luciousVelvet could possibly have gotten into the position shown in her profile picture, look on the right side navigation bar, click “block”, and click “okay”. The effect of this will be that you have one less follower, but you also have one less fake follower who looks less legitimate now and from whom you will never see a message again, in any form.
   Update: For even more fun, before you block them send out a message “@luciousVelvet #isaspammer” then some smart developer somewhere can develop a blacklist system for everyone with lots of #isaspammer tags on their account.  Just don’t misuse it otherwise we’ll need the #isnotaspammer tag as well.
   Twitter solution 2: Publish block lists or allow users to auto-block any user with more than x blocks by the wider twitter community.  If you set x=1000 then it should be pretty clear that anyone blocked by 1000 people is a spammer and no one wants to see their messages.
2. #Hashtopic Spam – I just discovered this type of spam recently while watching the fantastic explosion of geeky creativity that was/is the #songsincode twitter meme.  Basically, once a keyword or #hashtag becomes popular enough bots will focus in on it and start sending commercials for amazing teeth whitening solutions with the tag.  Spammers don’t wait until a topic is in the top 10 trends, it happens much earlier, basically it seems if the topic is generating a message every few seconds its worthy to be spammed.  This makes it hard to follow a topic.
   Twitter solution 3: Add a “spam” or “offtopic” button somewhere on the twitter search result page so that while reading the results of a search, people can flag tweets that are blatantly off topic.  Then allow people to select a setting that auto-filters tweets with a lot of  “spam” flags on it.  In addition, add a watch to the user generating those flags and use this as further observations in your advanced machine learning algorithm that decides when to disable twitter accounts. oh ya….
   Twitter solution 0: Institute an advanced machine learning algorithm that mines various twitter data generated automatically and by users to decide when to block or freeze twitter accounts suspected to be spammers.  If the freeze option is chosen then to unfreeze would require the twitter user to engage in a convincing email/skype exchange with some paid twitter staff to prove they are human.
   User Solution 2: same as user solution 1, block spamming users. It would take too much time to block all the spammers you see, but we should all consider it our duty as Twitter citizens (Twitizens?) to block at least five people a day in the course of our normal usage. Then, if Twitter ever gets around to using or publishing block information, it will be useful for something.  In the meantime, it will still be useful for you as you won’t see any messages from those users again.  Of course, they’ll just create another account, but that’s why we need Twitter to do something as well.
3. @name Spam – This is a type of spam that I am not famous enough to have thought of (at least not yet…).  I was reading Wil Wheaton’s blog (yes,that Wil Wheaton, it’s really well written) who’s on twitter under @wilw and he describes what I will call @name spam or twitter spoofing  (….twoofing?).  This is where a spammer sends messages that have the user ids of a famous user in the message to get their attention or ours.  Many people search for these famous users and will see the spam.  There are a couple problems with this which expose some design flaws in Twitter itself (gasp!).First, Twitter recently changed @replies to @mentions on the main webpage so that instead of seeing messages that began with @yourusername, you now see messages where @yourusername is anywhere in the message.  Users with lots of followers now see all these spam messages as part of their ‘replies’ and are overwhelmed, reducing their ability to respond, and destroying part of the community that Twitter is trying to foster.The second problem is that many of these spam tweets (twam?, spweets?, sorry, I’ll stop now. ) actually misrepresent these famous users.  They say
   “Ok, I’ll buy it! RT @ryanseacrest this waffle maker has changed my life! http://bit.ly/j3k2″  when everyone knows Ryan Seacrest is actually more of a pancake man. This seems unfair.
   Twitter Solution 4: All of the above solutions. Perhaps an additional, though controversial, help here would be to enforce RT message authenticity.  This could be a bit stifling and expensive computationally, but in theory you could look at every message with “RT @bob …” in it and check @bob’s message for anything like what they’ve said.  It would be easy to enforce exact RT’s, but then people wouldn’t be able to edit tweets to shorten them and make their own comment.  I could imagine creating a metric that measures how similar the RTed message is to any original tweet from @bob and dissallow it if its score is below some threshold.  But I don’t think there is any ideal solution short of making RTs actual threaded links to messages so that users don’t need to type in the original message at all, then the original message you are retweeting would show up below your own message on the Twitter page.  Actually, that sounds pretty good, they could that, call that Twitter Solution 5, get to it Twitter developers!
   User Solution 3: same as user solution 1, block’em!

All of these solutions may smack of censorship, but if implemented well, they could greatly improve the experience of Twitter while almost always filtering out only the users who abuse the system.  In the end, spam will never go away as long as there are people who  click on spam links and buy the merchandise.  If no one ever bought things via spam, there wouldn’t be any, that is certain.

Since we can’t change human nature, I’ll stick with suggesting my plan above to fix Twitter. Hopefully they’ll listen, if they can hear it through all the spam noise.  If not, then Twitter might become one of those dead technologies that was big for a while, but then became unusable and didn’t adapt as quickly as google or facebook/friendfeed or bing/live/microsoft.  Lets hope they figure it out.

But until then, we can all make our twitter experience a bit better by blocking people, start with just five a day. It’ll make you feel good

PS: I actually looked up @luciousVelvet after I wrote this and it turns out its not taken as a user name! Stunning, maybe the spammers aren’t as smart as I thought, or they’re smarter…. Anyways, I predict it will be taken within a week.

My contributions to songsincode.

My favourite #songsincode contributions from others so far

Twitter version:

this=new TheSongThatNeverEnds(); ...
message(me.friends, this + " will go on and on"); #songsincode

Long Version:

public class TheSongThatNeverEnds{

   public TheSongThatNeverEnds(int some){

      people = new Persons(some);

      sing(people);

   }

   public void sing(Persons people){

      boolean goOnSinging = true;

      for(int i=0; i<forever; i++){

         this = new TheSongThatNeverEnds();

         message(me.friends, this + " will go on and on");

         assert(!people.knowWhatItIs(this));

         assert(goOnSinging && i<forever);

         //just because

         i--;

      }

   stopSinging = false;

}

}

Update : I just found another fantastic use of twitter, maybe not quite as fun as #songsincode but less
work and really, really cool, I'll have to find out if its automated and how they do it.
Its called thelongestpoemintheworld.com and it takes currently appearing tweets and pairs them in rhyming couplets. That's it
 but it turns Twitter into a huge, inadvertent poetry jam. very awesome.

You can also follow them on twitter at #asteroidwatch, now no one can say your frantic checks for updates are pointless right?

Update: The attack is still ongoing, Twitter availability is still hit and miss.

From a technical point of view, this is astonishing because it means one of two things:

• either the attacker hates this user so much that they don’t care about bringing down several huge services to do it, the consequences and inevitable search for them give them no fear
• or, they somehow believed that attacking one user on twitter or facebook would just block the targeted account rather than the servers, the actual computers running twitter or facebook.  This is a mistake that would be impossible for a programmer or hacker to make.  While it may seem to the general user that their http://ImSoAmazing.blogspot.com site runs on its own machine, anyone capable of designing this attack would know that it is merely a virtual webserver run on a real machine (many real machines actually) that serve thousands and thousands of websites.  But what if the tools for the attack were made available to someone who didn’t know this?

Which brings us to the second amazing thing about this attack, the targeted user. It was a blogger with the handle Cyxymu whose most distinguishing characteristic is that he writes articles in favour of further freedom of Georgia from Russia….. that’s right, Russia.

Breath.

Was this an attack by a national government on some of the biggest webservices on the planet just to get at one rowdy blogger?  Was it more effective than they imagined?  Did a gov’t beuruacrat make a decision to simply use a tool given to him from the Cyber Warfare department apply this tool without fully understanding how it worked? Is the cold war back on, fought with flames online?

I don’t know do I? But this story is getting stranger by the day, keep an eye on it.

The idea of an elevator  to space has been close to nuclear fusion as one of those technologies that will always be twenty years away.  The traditional proposals have relied on superlight, superstrong cables to be attached to a geostationary satellite or captured asteroid.  Then an elevator would be run up and down that to allow access to space without the need for rocket propulsion.

Sounds great, the only problem is that such a cable could never support its own weight unless it was ludicrously strong and light.  It seems nanotech engineers are actually making progress towards this with carbon nano tube cables, but making those hundreds of kilometers long is still not possible.  I think they’re up to a couple inches now….

So this new proposal avoids that whole issue by proposing a floating platform, or rather, a series of floating platforms help up essentially by baloons and pnematics.  If it could be controlled properly it would be able to build with current technology.  I’ll have to read more about it but I do have some doubts about controlling the pneumatics to adjust for wind.  If this needs to be done alot then you may run into chaotic problems where your controls feedback into a swaying motion to adjust for the wind and you end up shaking apart.  I’ll need to read it in more detail to see if they’ve accounted for this, but they sound ready to try a small prototype so it would be worth trying.

Anything to reduce the price of that flight into space

Read the full research paper if you’re really interested, looks like a good read.

A senior Nasa official has told the Guardian that the world’s space agencies, or the commercial firms that may eventually succeed them, could issue one-way tickets to space, with the travellers accepting that they would not come back.

Then the authors go on to conclude that after conquering Mars by 2050 we’ll be exploring the other planets forthwith and just perhaps, even the stars. Creating this opening, they spend the rest of the article talking about said interstellar exploration and how ludicrously expensive it would be to fly to Alpha Centauri. They leave the impression that very idea of putting people on space ships never to return to Earth would only be useful for visiting other stars and that such efforts are unethical dreams to be imposed on the doomed children of generational ships.

Like I said, they jump around a bit. I don’t really take much issue with the facts of the article, I’d rather put a more positive light on it, but the tone is unfortunate. I think Mr. Olson is right that more creative methods of exploration need to be, well, explored and I’m glad to hear him mention commercial firms in the same breath as other national space agencies. That is because I think these national agencies, and NASA in particular, are part of the problem.

They have made space exploration a mundane of safety protocols.

I think the future exciting growth in space exploration will come from private ventures first bringing tourists and then conducting all kinds of business in space. The Planetary Society has a plan for future manned space exploration that skips over a US return to the moon in favour of human visits to Earth crossing asteroids as practice runs for a manned visit to Mars mid-century. Wouldn’t that be more exciting? Why not let China and Europe visit the Moon and have NASA do something different for a change. Why not discuss longer manned missions, where people leave a large ship to visit Jupiter or other asteroids and are equipped to live for years before returning? Why not spend more time on solar sails?

With risky ventures there will be more failures but there will be more excitement as well. Now, lest begin to ramble as I accuse others of doing, Mr. Olson is right about one thing, risk and never returning home won’t stop the flow of volunteers. Not when the adventure is to go somewhere where literally no one has gone before. They’ll sign whatever you want for the chance too. Why should humanity limit itself to safe exploration, one step as a time? When did that ever get us anywhere?

How long would it have taken Europeans to find America if they’d run their exploration the way NASA does? They already had a route to Asia, why take risks on an unknown route that might lead nowhere? NASA would rather scrap the shuttle and not be able to reach the space station at all for 4 years without Russian help than risk using an old design that doesn’t meet their ever increasing safety standards.

Exploration indeed.

Adopt the Planetary Society exploration plan, set a firm date for visiting Mars and accelerate approval for commercial visits to space, lets get moving already!

• iPhone or iPod Touch – by Apple
• Kindle – by Amazon
• Reader Digital Book – by Sony
• iLiad – Irex

I’ll add in comments later on what I find exciting about these products and what is stopping me from running out and buying them right now.

Related News

• Strike Against Kindle : News today that Amazon is willing to delete previously purchased copies of books on your kindle.  They did apparently refund the cost to readers but that is hardly the point.  This is possible because of Amazon’s admittedly very cool distribution system.  On a Kindle you can buy a book online anytime, anywhere through a free cellphone connection built into the Kindle.  Of course when Amazon says “anywhere” they mean the USA.  Being in Canada this is one of my main reasons for not yet diving into a Kindle.  The particular book deleted in this case is one of the best examples of irony in the real world I’ve seen in a long time.Read all about it : Amazon Remotely Deletes Purchased Copies of 1984 and Animal Farm From Thousands of Kindles
  Update: Turns out those deleted books were uploaded by third parties onto Amazon’s Kindle bookservice just like they can on the main Amazon website, so they simply deleted copies that did not have the proper copyrights.  So much for Big Brother… Amazon has also promised to update their policies so that in future when this happens the offending copies will not be removed from those who have already purchased them.

• overhead : Posting to twitter is “easy” if you use the main website, but most power users don’t do that.  The main website is clunky and doens’t allow you to filter the firehose of information that is a Twitter feed.  Instead, people use an installed app on their machine like Tweedeck or Tweetie or one of the many external websites integrated to post to twitter such as TwitIQ or bit.ly.  This either requires downloading and installing software or creating accounts on these services and saving bookmarks for posting quickly when a thought comes to mind.  Clearly, many people don’t do this and as a result do not post much or at all through the main website.  Those who do invest in setting up a bit of infrastructure to post will understandably do it more often than those who don’t.
• iPhone : In a similar vein, many users post to Twitter via iPhone or some other cell phone, many people do not have these phone or data plans that allow posting for free so we would expect those who do post via cellphone to do it a lot and everyone else to do it not at all.
• 140 characters : A single tweet does not carry much information, it is common for people to post multiple tweets on the same topic in quick succession to give a more full explanation.  This multiplication of user posts will add up quickly relatives to users not posting at all.
• conversation threads :  another common pattern is a series of messages back and forth between two or three users on some topic or arranging a meetup.  This would create a larger than average number of posts for a small number of users, further pumping up the number.
• live blogging : Twitter is an ideal medium for liveblogging events such as conferences, conventions and rallies.  This means that a single user, or the relatively small number of attendees of a conference, post a large number of tweets about the events throughout the day.
• news/event feed : one of the most useful ways to use twitter is as your own personalized news and events feed.  By searching on different terms of interest to you, you can find users who post regularly with comments, news and links that you want to hear about.  You can then follow them to keep up to date on the topics they seem to be interested in.  This usage pattern relies on the fact that some people post a lot and most people read a lot.  The user reading their feed has no need to respond to all the posts they see and no one would expect them to.
• games : A recent trend, is for people to create twitter trend games where a hashtag keyword is defined, such as #crapsuperpowers, and people post back with the hashtag and their input.  Some games involve constructing sentences using movie names or based on some quote in the news.  The point is that there are people who play games and once they play one they are likely to play many, probably multiple times as they think of better answers and respond to other great answers by others playing the game to vote on the winner.  This encourages a small group of users who like playing games to post many tweets that non-gameplaying users would not post.

For all these reasons, we would not expect the usage patterns of twitter users as measured by tweets per user to be a continuous, smooth scale such as  (none, once a month, twice a month, thrice a month, etc…, Ashton Kutcher).  We would expect a large number of users who logged on and didn’t get it, another group who post very rarely using the clunky web interface and a smaller group of high users ranging from news feed readings on the low end to  new-posting, games-playing, live-blogging, iPhone-using super-tweeters at the high end.

That is Twitter, that’s how it works and how it’s supposed to work.  There is no need to change the service to increase its usage based on a flawed measure such as tweets per user.

Having brought up this point, it occurs to me that there is a much more insidious belief system permeating the scientific community that doesn’t receive nearly enough attention.  I speak, of course, of Newtonianism and its more modern form, Relativism.  Did you know that modern physicists hold the absurd idea that all objects fall at the same rate regardless of what they are made up of or how heavy they are?  They would say that 1 ton of lead falls to earth at exactly the same rate as 1 ton of feathers or iron.  I find this whole notion truly strange, I feel gold is a more noble and pure substance and should speed to earth more quickly than lead.  And clearly, 1 ton of feathers is more airy and would not fall to earth as quickly as iron and gold.  Physicists will quibble that they mean this to be true in a vacuum once air resistance is accounted for but what they are really hiding is a love for Issac Newton’s pet theory of Mechanics that purports to explain that this strange belief actually holds true in the world.  All of physics of the past few centuries has been nothing but  a popularity contest between notable theoreticians. Scientific experiments serve mainly to justify the beliefs of one group over another.  In such a way the cult of Albert Einstein usurped Newtonianism in the 1920′s to lead us to a point today where almost all physicists are Relativists, so called after Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.  This belief system is actually consistent with Newtonianism, much as Christianity is with Judaism, but includes additional strange beliefs such as that time slows down as velocity increases and that the universe originated in a Big Bang about 12 Billion years ago.

Newtonianism, Darwinism and now Relativism are a threat to the fabric of our society.  These people are trying to tear down the binds of common sense and reason that hold our society together.  If we have to believe what we are told about the world from people who purport to know simply because they have observed the world in detail and seen that this is how it works then is it really belief?  The ‘truths’ these Relativisits are telling us are not ‘true for me’ and so why should I accept them?  I’m not going to teach Relativism to my children and have them worship at the feet of Einstein, Newton and Gallileo.  I and I alone will decide who’s feet they worship at.

I don’t see why we should cause such a huge disturbance for residents and businesses as there was on cambie just for a few students going to UBC.  The B-line’s are working fine.

There were also other callers complaining about how Vancouver has resisted this kind of build up for years and it would be a shame to see “kitsilano go”. That sort of says it all doesn’t it?  There is some kind of idea amongst the residents of the West End and other cheerleaders of Vancouver that the lack of urban development, the lack of rapid transit, the horrible traffic, the absence of affordable food and shopping is some kind of plus for the city.  Don’t get me wrong, Kitsilano is nice, its a great set of  neighbourhoods. Peaceful and serene and inaccessible.  And the residents would like to keep it that way thank you very much.

Well, you’re not welcome.  Kitsilano and the entire West Side of town benefits from a asymmetric set of zoning rules and urban development projects.  The West side stays inaccessible because the skytrains were all built to access the east side and eastern suburbs.  Why was there no rapid transit to Richmond until now? Why was the Cambie line such a big deal? Its too close for comfort.

The big box stores are all only on the eastern and southern edges of town so that Kits can keep it wonderful neighbourhood feeling.  Its so warm and fuzzy.  But who lives in those neighbourdhoods?  Can you afford a house there?  I can’t. Neither can all of the immigrants and working class people who live in the the east side of town.  The rapid transit there helps them get to their manufacturing and service jobs, the affordable big box stores make it possible for them to afford meals.   They couldn’t live in the west side of town even if they could get their faster.  And if they have to work on the west side, well, there’s always the B-line.  All of these zoning and infrastructure decisions by city hall support the East-West divide in Vancouver.

So why don’t people from east of Main speak up? Don’t they have a voice in the city council? Oh right, they have no representation at all, never have. This is because the voting at large system of municipal elections favours parties from the well funded west side of town and downtown. So all the members of council conform to policies set by parties in Kits, downtown and shaughnessy.  Handy.

The only reason we’re having this discussion at all is because UBC is such a big congestion problem that people are commuting through the paradise of Kits, how inconvenient.  It is not “just a few” students, there are 40,000 students at UBC and those buses are packed every morning.  Many people have to wait for multiple buses to get in and when they get a bus they are packed like sardines in a can, standing for 40 minutes on the bus.  No problem, why would we need a train? Also, although the callers may not like to think about it, there are actually a lot of people on the west side who can’t afford cars to get out of town when they need to, they live in those big houses nearby you that have been turned into rooming houses.  The ones with 4 or 5 apartments carved into the rooms.  I’m thinking they would all love a faster, more reliable way to get to the centre of town.

This resistance to making Vancouver function efficiently as a whole is a symptom of a larger problem that the city allows gross inequalities from one side of town to the other allowing the city to become ghettoized into different regions with haves and have nots.  Its makes for an unattractive result, if you look around at the big picture and for me greatly detracts from claims that Vancouver is a paradise.  Just because its paradise doesn’t mean it can be run efficiently.

They are trying to start a discussion about realistic, upcoming as well as fantastic dreams for the future of space.  This is a good way to go about it I think, until we know what it is we really dream about we can know how to choose from what is possible or how to push beyond the just possible.

One of the questions was along the lines of, if you had one thing to say to the designers of future space flight systems what would it be?  Here’s what I said:

Keep your mind open, think beyond government centralized control, think beyond scientific goals. Think of the internet, the blogosphere etc, how that exploded in a short time once people were enabled with technology. How could we enable small governments, corporations even groups of committed individuals to harness technology for use in space or even to explore space? Computer power is available, the knowledge is available. Committed groups of people exploring for their own goal may be willing to take risks and reap rewards that government programs never could. As space scientists and engineers how can you enable this kind of revolution?

BBC NEWS | Twitter on the front line.

So, just to keep you worried, the next best way for death to come from space is a Coronal Mass Ejection from the sun.  There’s a great article about CME’s at the NewScientist.  Essentially, a CME is a huge blob of plasma that gets ejected from the sun.  If one of these happens to hit the Earth then it could overload all the major power grids on Earth.  But this isn’t your regular solar storm.  The effect would be to melt the transformers across the grid rather than just overloading and resettting them.  A recent report has described a frightening scenario of how this could take months or years to rebuild and repare.  Months and years where this is no electricity distribution.  They think through some of the secondary effects of this in our modern societies where food, medicine, water and heat are all produced by centrally distributed electricity.  Developed nations would be the hardest hit, with no backup system of sustenance for the population if the power distribution system disappeared overnight.

Another worrying aspect of this threat is that the only satellite capable of giving us a reasonable warning of 15-45 minutes that a CME is coming is getting old and is not being replaced.  Seems like we’ve got some planning to do.  The next most likely time for a big CME to occur is during the next solar peak in 2012.  That year seems to be coming up a lot these days when talking about the end of the world.

I think we should have set up a Moon base long ago and that such a base would be fundamentally more interesting and useful than the current space station.  It mightn’t have been cheaper mind you, its a long way to the Moon compared to low Earth orbit.  But it would have been more exciting and allowed for more people and more science to happen if we had a solid moon base instead of a rickety floating one.  I know there is micro-gravity science to be done too, but that could mostly be done in shuttles or other experiments.  After all these years it is only now that the space station is complete enough and soon will have room for more crew that real science can be done around the clock.  As it is now the current few astronauts are busy just maintaining the systems.

But I digress.  The planetary society recently released its plan for a bold new future in space and exploration of the Moon is in there, but as an optional addition.  They encourage NASA to allow other nations just getting their feet wet in space, like China, Japan and even Europe, to do the Moon bit. Meanwhile, the more experienced US program should push beyond the Moon, out into interplanetary space with missions to near Earth asteroids.  These missions would be exciting, scientifically useful and …well exciting!  And they would give some real preparation for the real goal of human space exploration which should be putting some bootprints on Mars.

If you sawa Wall-e, you’ll get a very clear picture of the future of low earth orbit, its not that bad yet but there is a lot of stuff up there.    The problem is that such a huge area is invovled that its almost impossible to imagine how to clean up the trash once its there.  So hopefully mission planners are being more careful now than they used to be in order to avoid leaving dangerous material in orbit.

Given Google’s ambitious goals to organize all the worlds information, all of it!, I’m sure much more of your correspondence will be hanging around than you’d like for years to come. One crazy futuristic benefit of really saving everything may be a kind of immortality. And I don’t mean the kind of immortality where people talk about what a great/horrible person you were. I mean immortality in the sense that there is a talking, thinking copy of you that thinks it is you (maybe it is?). In order to overcome the ocean of data about someone it may become easier to build a simulation of them using all their blog,facebook,twitter,etc. info. Then we could just talk to the person and find out what they thought.

I’m not saying we’re there yet by any means. And I’m an AI researcher, I should know, we are soooo not there yet. But give it a couple decades and we’ll be close.  Lack of data and computing power are two major limiting factors at the moment.  The other factor is inadequately complex models, or perhaps the wrong models.  That’s what we’re working on.  But as other’s have pointed out, if computing power continues to increase at its current exponential rate (which is not certain) then we won’t need to worry about modelling as much as copying.  Copying the brain.  And all that social networking data is tantalizing if you are looking for some background knowledge to fill your brain with.  And once the real person is dead there will be no privacy issues (though I could be wrong about that, “I’m a mad scientist Jim, not a lawyer!”)

So you may want to think about that when leaving all your public info out there?

(Interesting question for a later blog…should people have a legal will to deal with their internet persona? Would you want your internet persona laid to rest as well?  Or would you donate your social networking brain to science and possibly live again in some form?)

But sometimes overdoing it for effect can have its purposes. A smaller asteroid, only a few miles across is much more likely and while it wouldn’t be as totally devestating as this, it would easily end the little global civilization we’ve got going and give the human survivors some very interesting shit to deal with. Even more likely, as in 100% chance, are even smaller asteroids several hundred metres across that could easily kill millions and enormously disrupt the world. These asteroids will hit us eventually, it may be in the next century, it may be in the next 50,000 years, but they will come and it won’t be milions of years from now.

What are we doing about it? Not much, more surveys are looking for asteroids but they could be much better funded and the planning to deflect these asteroids, which is perfectly possible.

If the moon in this video comes we will have enough warning to launch some escape pods but we’ll be doomed. But if something smaller comes by we may not have much warning at all, a few decades if we’re lucky. And we’re not ready.
More on Video On HuffPost
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

More Destruction: If this didn’t scare you, you’ll love this.

You can see other great images from Irish amateur astronomers of the alignment of Jupiter, Venus and the Moon a few weeks ago at the Irish Astronomical Association.

Great to have these pictures as where I live the skies were all clouded over.  Of course it cleared up perfectly two nights later when it didn’t matter.

Clear skies.

Vancouver 2010 logo

I’m looking forward to the olympics coming in two years to Vancouver. I’ve never lived in a city when the olympics are on because I’ve always lived in Toronto and for some reason Toronto will never get the olympics. Well, lets hope Vancouver’s games run smoothly, because they aren’t off to a very promising start. I signed up to be a volunteer. I found out today that their process for interviewing and contacting volunteers is very naive. It turns out they only call people during business hours, 9 -5 and maybe until 1 on Saturdays. It’s apparently very hard to get people to work outside these hours. They also do not leave messages if you aren’t home or don’t answer your phone at work because, get this, you can’t call them back!

So, they need to find you, and there is no way for you to find them after they’ve called or even for you to know they’ve called. Its like they don’t want to get in touch with volunteers except for unemployed people and students who stay at home all day. This is very strange. Rather than contacting people during the day they should only call people in the evening when they are more likely to be home. I hope they update their policy soon or they aren’t going to get the best people that already have a busy schedule but want to help make these olympics great.

And I love Canada.

But I am becoming ashamed now.  The reason for my shame is a recurring problem, it happened in Athens four years ago and its even worse this time.  I’m talking of course about the dearth of medals Canada is getting in the olympics, or rather, people’s whining about it.

Its seven days in and Canada hasn’t got a medal yet.  People are complaining that our athletes aren’t trying hard enough and how can we be a real country with no medals, look at Turkmenistan!

Well, thats too bad isn’t it?  But I believe in the old saying ‘Let he who hath made it to an olympic final cast the first stone.’  I am not an olympic athlete, and I never will be.  The determination and drive that it requires to get to the olympics, especially a mono-sport-obsessed country such as Canada, amazes me.  These people are fantastic, they are working hard, for their dream.  And we’re complaining? What right have the citizens of Canada to complain that these athletes aren’t trying hard enough.  As we sit in our armchairs eating popcorn watching some young swimmer, or runner or rower come in 8th or 20th in the world, what right have we to complain?

Are we willing to pay more taxes in order to increase funding and recruitment for sports?  Are we willing to fund prizes so that those who are successful can actually live off their success if they can’t get a cereal box deal?  Probably not.  We want to pay as little as possible and we want these kids to make us feel good about being Canadian.  Well, in the spirit of Canadian fairness, that just isn’t fair.  You get what you pay for and even then, its their dream, not ours.

For 365 days a year there is just one sport Canadians really care about, hockey.  Maybe a bit of curling and lacrosse.  Then every four years we get it into our head that we should be winning medals in the 100m dash, rowing, archery, weightlifting and gymnastics.  If Canadians really cared about those sports they’d support them all year long, every year. They’d watch the tournaments, they’d know who the athletes are already.  All we really care about is getting the medals to massage our weak ego.

So I hope our olympic athletes stop apologizing for not winning.  They have no one to apologize to. It is the Canadian public and the Canadian media that needs to apologize to them.  We should support them in their dreams and tell them that we are proud that they are there but that the achievement is all their own.

Read the full story.

What amazes me is how the structure inside looks so … well, human. It almost seems like an idealized set of lungs, heart and stomach. Now maybe its just the pattern recognition in my brain going into overdrive, but this is much more than seeing a face in a cloud in the sky. There is a question of how tweaked the parameters are in the colouring algorithm, which I will have to look into sometime. But regardless, I find it a beautiful and inspiring picture. A serene reminder of the beauty inherent in mathematics if only we know how to tease it out, or to just see it.

Read the story.

1. whoever is projecting this light turns it off when the clouds come over (this supports by adaptive optics telescope theory)
2. the light is visible not because it is hitting clouds but because it is lighting up other clouds or dust higher up in the atmosphere
3. I could see the light because it was behind an inverted mountains of clouds nearer to me than where it was reflecting.

Anyways, here is another picture, even worse than the first.

In case you’re thinking I’m going all UFO on you, don’t worry. After observing the light for a while it became clear that its some kind of beam with pointed up into the sky. Different parts of the beam became visible at different times, sometimes there were three sections of green light all lined up in a straight line. This is supposedly due to clouds passing in front of the beam and making it visible. It was a very stunning thing to watch and many people on campus were just standing around looking at it.

So my question is, what was it?
I have heard one theory that it is the result of an adaptive optics beam being used from a telescopic. But this would seem unnecessarily powerful for such a use, and it was very cloudy so why would you test a telescope?

Any ideas?
Post up here, more pictures also welcome.

I had one of those today. The internet did it to me, and I don’t think there is anything I can do to stop it. The internet and all its wonderful social networking power, is slowly, inexorably drawing humanity together. The theory of six degrees of seperation is becoming measurable and even if its off by a number or two, evenutually, we’re going to find a way to link ourselves to anyone. At the very least to anyone we’ve ever known.

Ever.

No matter how much you don’t want to meat the bully from third grade or the person that dumped you 10th grade or the person you dumped in 11th grade. You’re going to see them all. You aren’t forced to add them to your facebook friends. But at some point they’ll you be only one poke away from destruction.
Maybe we should always face our past or our fears, its good for us. But soon we’re not going to have the option. And there is a sense in that the internet is doing this to us and we mere individuals are powerless to stop it. The social networking phenomenon is a natural progression and now that it has begun it will accelerate. So all these things will come to pass.

Prepare yourself for it.

Original Post:

So Microsoft has decided to throw their money in the ring.